Tang-Yu (Kevin) Tseng

While sitting in my classes last week, I can’t help but notice several computer screens in front of me were all defaulted to Apple’s new Ipod website. Apple recently released their latest revision of Ipod Touch, and like every Apple product, it’s received nothing but praise and hype. This trend has been happening for several years now. In fact, Apple has always had a way to market their products in a way that consumers are able to identify them in a different category, even though most products they sell are direct competitions to many identical and cheaper alternatives that consumers don’t typically think about.

Then I started to think to myself, how can a company who overcharges their product and overhypes their technology be so successful? How can their simple and plain ads be so effective at capturing a consumer’s attention and needs? As I thought more about it, I started doing more secondary research.

As part of my research, I found an interesting blog that talks about a similar topic, “Marketing Apple: Secrets of the World’s Best Marketing Machine“. Through this blog, I found out that Apple is now the world’s second largest company (in terms of valuation) behind Exxon. How were they able to achieve this? The author of this blog states:

A lot of that has to do with mindshare. And Apple has earned mindshare to spare.

And I couldn’t agree more!

To me, I think that is what Apple succeeds in areas that companies like Microsoft do not is that although they have not earned the majority of product  market share, they have earned the majority of product mind share. And in the business world, mind share is what causes stock prices to go up due to all the interest and buzz about the company. The value of mind share is therefore more valuable than the value of market share. To me, market share is set in the present, but mind share is focused towards the future direction of the product/company.

Companies such as Apple, Coca Cola, and Nike are perfect examples to why I feel marketing to be so interesting and important. Even if a company owns the most amazing product/idea, without effective marketing and promotion, they can never reach their true potential. I realized that the answer to every question I had were pointing in the same direction: Apple’s marketing team, and the guru leading the pack, Steve Jobs. I will talk more about Steve Job’s marketing genius in next week’s blog.

After reading Scott’s post earlier in the term, I started following Old Spice’s viral campaign on youtube, and I must say, this is one effective viral campaign!!! I’ve been talking to several friends about what they thought of Old Spice’s influence on social media and social networks and everyone has been giving me positive feedback about the commercial. I feel that this ad is starting to grow onto people, and viewers of this ad unconsciously associate anything “manly” with the Old Spice brand. Not only did Old Spice expand their viral campaign into facebook, twitter, and youtube by responding to viewer’s questions and posts, I found out recently that, they even started an Old Spice Voicemail campaign!

Essentially, this website generates your own free customized Old Spice voice mail with none other than Old Spice guy’s masculin voice. The creators made both a male and female version of this voice mail so it is exposed to a broader audience. Not only is this campaign hilarious and fun to play with, I feel that this is an extremely effective way of tapping into the general public by mass-advertising and creating a new culture for the brand. The idea here is that even people who do not know of this viral campaign will now ask questions about it and start to follow it as a result of hearing their friend’s voice mail, thus expanding the network further… Absolutely brilliant!!! And this is why I love marketing 🙂

This blog is now diamonds.

On a similar note, I read and commented on my classmate, Matt Venner’s,  and TA, Scott’s, blog on the same topic of Old Spice. Check it out here and here respectively!

“Hello, I’m a Mac. Hello, I’m a PC”. We hear this phrase so often in society today that it’s embedded into our pop-culture. Although it is a witty and funny way of bringing out PC’s weaknesses, I feel that the message that Apple is trying to convey in their advertisement to be unethical, ignorant, and misleading.

Through these ads, we see that Apple trying to focus on corporate stereotypes and attack the traditional way of computing by introducing the idea that “PCs are what your parents use” to Generation ME. With their sarcastic ads, Apple tries to target our generation by manipulating our buying habits and shifting our focus onto a more stylish and unconventional way of computing. Apple’s main messages in these ads is that “PC’s are not cool/hip, so therefore Mac is better”.

For many people with solid understanding of computers will know that messages apple are trying to convey are only based on the surface of general computing and is in fact very untrue.

To prove my point, here are some examples:

1. In an advertisment entitled “Surgery”, Apple is trying to imply that PCs needs to be updated while a Mac does not. Upgrading a PC from Windows XP to Windows VISTA is very troublesome and therefore feels like the computer is undergoing a “major surgery”. This is clearly not the case as Macs do require major updates as well (such as the Mac OSX Leopard), the only reason that people tend to miss that fact is because Apple fan-boys tend to purchase new Apple products every year or two. And by doing that, they are purchasing a whole software bundle which includes the upgrades that Windows users typically have to do seperately.
2. In the advertisement entitled “Better Results”, Apple claim that Macs can outperform a PC in creating photos and videos. Again, this is false advertising as they are not using a level playing field when they are comparing the quality of the software. You can get great video/photo editing software for Windows if you purchase them separately. And by doing so, you are still paying just as much, if not less, than the money you spend on buying Mac software or Macs in general.
3. In the advertisement entitled “Viruses”, Apple went overboard by implying that Macs cannot get a virus. This is just outright absurd! Every computer is vulnerable to viruses. Macs may not get the same types of viruses PCs get, but they certainly get malicious software and threats themselves. Whether it be in the form of worms or trojan horses, security breach is unavoidable. Furthermore, the reason why PC’s seem to catch more attention is because there are a lot more PC users than Mac users.

All in all, I would like to conclude that companies should not use ignorant and false advertisement to their advantage in order to fool or mislead the general public from the truth.